01 October 2013

THE MISEDUCATION OF NIGERIA - the loss of content and the dumbing down of everything sacred

Every generation clings to a nostalgia of the past, refusing
to let go of the umbilical chord that connects to the ‘good old days’. This is
fair enough for each generation. Not so for the generation after them, many of
who are repulsed by the constant glancing back and who may believe that advancement
in technology, the Internet, the iPad, and 4G connections more than compensate
for the loss of family values and a slower pace of living. In countries like
China and India, this trade-off may be acceptable, however for Nigeria; it's a
double whammy of losses. Our greatest problem is not just the loss of the good
old days, but also the cataclysmic surrender of the future.

Although, it is generally believed that corruption
is the major slayer of everything
good in Nigeria; the time bomb is the mis-education of our people, the
celebration of mediocrity and the resulting casualness of our youth. These
unchecked bugs have surreptitiously but steadily stripped our nation and its
people of everything decent, everything cultured and everything of value. Be it
in our music, art, communication skills, church, politics, print media,
literature, broadcasting, and banking, it’s like Nigeria has been stripped of
every valuable asset by an evil business predator leaving us only with cheap
dross. Sadly we appear not to appreciate the seriousness of this matter.

Poor
Communication Skills

Someone once said, “the average Nigerian, when he’s NOT told,
will not ask questions.” I also believe, that an average Nigeria, when he’s
told, will not ask questions either. One of the major areas that expose our mis-education
is the rarity of good communication skills. Many of our graduates find it extremely
difficult to articulate their thoughts and be expressive. Worse still, they are
blissfully unaware. In trying to appear posh, some of our young people miss the
plot entirely, pronouncing 'time' as 'thyme', and ‘yes’ as ‘yels’; they
jumble up their sentences and make no sense most of the time. Employers are understandably
frustrated about having to painstakingly explain everything to a graduate
employee just for him to grasp their bearing. Graduates on their part cannot
understand why employers are being 'unnecessarily difficult.' Rather than
doing something to baulk this trend, our
professors, educationists and politicians fall over themselves to be the most
popular user of 'big' English words that bear no correspondence with reality.

Instead of cutting edge programmes on our television stations,
what we have are presenters attempting to speak in fake foreign accents. These novices
parading themselves as 'pros' confine generations of Nigerians to communication
backwardness with words like ‘WED-NES-DAY’ for ‘wednes/day’; ‘next tomorrow’;
for ‘day after tomorrow’; and ‘de-ve-lope’ for ‘de-ve-lop.’

Apart from the apparent pronunciation issues, our main national
TV news lead with stories of the sitting president, vice president and senate
president, in that order most nights irrespective of what is happening around
the world. Silly me, what do I expect from a media house that has used the same
theme song for over three decades. Rather than a self-introspection of its
calamitous state, this same media house takes the mickey out of us all by
gleefully referring to itself as the biggest in Africa. Obviously we are not
fooled. In fact, when Nigerians see NTA, it is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138 all
over again: “When my love swears that she
is made of truth / I do believe her, though I know she lies”.

Dumb and
Dumber

We are engaged in a systematic dumbing down of everything
sacred and everything good including our television shows. Out are ‘Cock Crows
at Dawn,’ ‘Village Headmaster’, ‘Mirror in the Sun’, ‘The Masquerade’, ‘Baba
Sala’, all of which were well-thought out dramas that illuminated minds and
educated millions. In, are trash Nollywood movies, endless reality shows and
round-the-clock hip-hop music. We seem to have occupied our miserable lives
with reality shows and European football.

Our journalism is poor and the newspapers offer no learning
articles or features to young people growing up. Our media do not do investigative
journalism, and they have no seasoned writers either.A
glance through a typical daily will show that they are mostly glorified
advertisement pages littered with messages of congratulations to a charlatan
who has just bought a doctorate degree from a bogus American university or a
looter who has just been given his 20th chieftaincy title by an equally
shameless traditional king.

Talking about traditional rulers, they once were
the custodians of everything sacred and noble. Now their belly is their god.
Bribed with the latest cars, they lose their voice of reason and respect. Through
their inaction and greed, some of them connive with Governors and politicians
to bleed their people dry.

We have massacred and plundered everything and we now have a
nation stripped of its culture and sheared of its history. Whilst it may be
true that dumbing down is a global phenomenon, particularly amongst young
people in this computer age, the tragedy for Nigeria is that unlike many other
countries we have nothing to fall back on. We do not have a huge manufacturing
base like China or a local Silicon Valley like India. We have no great palaces,
stately homes, parks or works of art that can provoke nostalgia like in
European countries. All these countries can afford to dumb down to some
extent as they have counterbalancing infrastructure in people, the art, or
technology. Nigeria just cannot afford to do the same.

Charlatans
as heroes

In Nigeria, we lose our few heroes and replace them with charlatans.
Rather than visionary leaders with real strategies for development, we have
built a manufacturing line of motivational speakers who are long on words but
short in content. And we celebrate them. We diminish the best of our traditions;
we create what should be a passing fancy and make them tradition. We have a
twisted code of honour, flattering and edifying political rogues and economic
thieves at the expense of honest hardworking people.

We are slaves to what we should master and
overbearing with things that are trivial; slaves to protocol; titles, and academic
qualification, yet we shout in public, pick our nostrils and cannot make our
health system work.

Fads over
Values

In my view, the problem with our country is hardly the
corruption of stealing money; it is the corruption of what is right, decent and
good. It is the elevation of fads over values, instant-ness over process; reality
shows over reality. Obviously this was long in coming, I should have noticed.
Sometime in 2008, I was traveling outside Lagos. At the top of the hour, I
wanted to find out what was happening around the world. I switched the radio on
and searched for a station where I could listen to the news. After going
through a dozen stations and being confronted with one form of rap music or the
other, I realised we were in a deep mess. No news bulletin, no current
affairs programme, nothing to challenge the brain. I found out this was the
norm, not a one off. Little wonder very few of our graduates and young people
are anywhere near an acceptable level of intellectual capacity.

The new fad is to deny our children the privilege of speaking
their mother tongue even when born and raised in Nigeria. In the process they
still do not speak good English and they lose out of the balance and well
roundedness offered by the rich anecdotes, stories, sayings, and folklores of their
mother language.

Another fad is the standard for all pastors to talk the same
way, carry themselves the same way, walk as if they are doing the ground a
favour and teach funny doctrines such as 'prophet offerings' to unsuspecting,
gullible and clearly lazy congregants. In the same churches, we have
substituted dancing for praise, attending endless programmes for service and
blind obedience to the pastor for following Jesus.

The Crumbling
of People

It isn't just the crumbling of infrastructure therefore that is
one of our greatest challenges; it is also the crumbling of people, of business
expertise, of political savvy-ness, of seasoned civil servants, of culture, of
manners, of excellence. This is evident in the inability to do anything well,
and the safe ignorance of this. For example, it is believed that there is no
known indigenous Nigerian company that has been going for 100 years. In the
same vein, we have no definitive evidence of our history too, no known book or
books that can be picked up to give an in-depth literature of the Nigerian
journey. There is almost an artistic vulgarity to our un-repented
walk-away from everything that tasks the brain. Our people do not want books
and culture; they really don’t want to learn. What we eat and breathe is money
and not knowing what to do with it.

In comparison to other countries, the disparity is clear.
Travelling on the tube in London, a good percentage of commuters carry a book.
If you frequently use the same route, you will get to notice that the same
commuter with the big book three days ago now has his head buried in a
different big book. These are hardly professors but ordinary individuals
challenging their brains daily. In Nigeria, we fill our times with
entertainment, not education; gossip magazines, not books.

Somehow, we have accepted that saying ‘you are
welcome’ is the way to welcome people, and putting a straw in a 1-litre carton
of juice at a party is fine. So it's not just in our communication that
we have been mis-educated, it's also in our attitude and behaviour. We assume
that we can keep other people's ‘change’,
we place unrealistic demands on people and we make them enemies when they don't
deliver. We think academic qualification equals education. We have no serious understanding
of the notion of exposure.

We
appear to have graduated from urbane people
conscious of the value of a good name into an area-boy dance culture. Our core geology has been washed away,
replaced by layers of sedimentary hogwash. Instead of the value of a good name,
we celebrate criminals masquerading as politicians. The visionary efforts of
true heroes past who pioneered TV, free education, rubber and cocoa plantations
and industrial estates have been replaced by empty-barreled Governors whose
only legacy are a dozen bus stops in four years of governance.

The Knowledge
Disrespect

Our average university student cannot complete the basic
Yoruba proverb, Omo ti o ba fe je asamu...He
probably thinks Socrates is a Brazilian football international and that the
Cold War was an actual battle fought with tanks and guns. He may not be able to
name the first executive President of Nigeria and has no clue about NATO, the
Warsaw Pact or Newton's First Law of Motion.

University education has been so badly decimated
that our graduates require a master’s degree from foreign universities to be
taken seriously by any employer. We no longer have public libraries, we can't
easily walk into a cinema, we have no galleries for art, no science or cultural
or historical museums. We no longer have Civics lessons that teach about king
Jaja of Opobo, Oba Overami of Benin, and Nnamdi Azikiwe’s birth in Zungeru in
1904. The mis-education of Nigeria is no longer a time bomb; it has become a
ticking time bomb.

We used to be the country of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, of
Wole Soyinka, of quality magazines like Atoka
and Aworerin; of good Yoruba books
like Kadara, and Aja lo leru; of the Pacesetters
series, and of many authors in the African Writers Series. Only a quarter of a
century ago, book reading was the right of passage into teenage-hood, to now find
anyone in Nigeria who reads a book or weekly magazine by habit is as rare as
the Haley’s Comet.

Music and the ArtOur musicians used to make sense with their songs. Bongos
Ikwue sang of meaningful paradox in order to make a point:

Show
me a virgin in a maternity wardShow me sunrise that comes from the westShow me a river that never flowsShow me a woman who will never fall in love

Sonny Okosun was a freedom fighter through his many songs such
as Fire in Soweto, and Papa's Land.
With music, he was able to capture the suffering of South Africans, Namibians
and Zimbabweans in the 70s and 80s. Through his music, he single handedly
created in me the awareness of justice and probably sowed in me the desire to
use politics to effect change. All these before I was 10. Nowadays however, everyone
- young people, old people, male and female, corporate bigwigs and responsible
housewives, politicians and lecturers, pastors and Imams, area boys and church congregation
are all into the Yahooze dance or alanta. My firm belief is that a nation
is in trouble when its housewives, politicians and criminals share the same
values and dance to the same tune.

Mortgaging
the Future

I once had a conversation with a young man who needed money
to purchase an application form for his GCSE. He routinely mentioned that he
would take the examination at a ‘special centre’ where invigilators will assist
them to cheat for a fee. When I challenged him about this, he looked at me as
if I was the strange one. Our mis-education is complete when you are considered
strange for questioning a fraudulent behaviour.

I’m often worried about how the future will pan
out with the crop of people being raised in the country at the moment. I’m
worried not only for the future of the country but also for the people as I
foresee a form of intellectual servitude to expatriates if things don’t change.
It could be argued that this is already happening as more and more companies
are recruiting Nigerians abroad to key corporate and public positions, a
phenomenon that puts homegrown graduates in the long grass.

The Future

I
have deliberately analysed things the way I see them. Despite the unwholesome
picture, I am optimistic about the future. Firstly, because it is the most
pragmatic thing to do. If I’m not, I shall be giving in to the people who have
systematically raped our country. A better attitude is to continue working, in
my own little way, to address the problem. I am committed to this. In any
event, it is because of this optimism that I am motivated to do what I do.

Secondly,
I am optimistic because I know the solution to our problem is easy. We need
education, education, and education. Good education liberates people and
changes mindsets. Attempting to arrest the problem after university or with
youth empowerment programmes is too late; what we need is a comprehensive
educational strategy that ensures every child has a good grounding in life. This
policy will also include a complete strategy to train skilled artisans in
plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, tailoring, building, motor mechanic etc.

We
also need visionary leaders to make this happen. Although it appears we lack
this at the moment, it isn’t because we don't have them in our midst; they are
just not in leadership yet. They will soon.

Gbenga Badejo is the publisher of PostcardfromLagos.com. He is also a Principal
Partner at ParkRoyal & Lagos Finishing School

5 comments:

Very good article.Though I fear you are too harsh in some places.And too kind to the past in other cases - I never saw the need for civics lessons when I was at school.Keep up the good work.Warm regards.Michael N

Thank you for all though out piece, most of us have known for long that our country is where undeservings get ahead of hard working people, it is sad how we found ourselves at this state of decay, area boys lives better because we don't reward excellence as you rightly pointed out, people are ready to steal your ideas, even the one you passed on to them are dumb down only because they didn't want you to claim ownship. My brother once gave idea on how to spread computer useage only for him to hear about its inception form strange sourcesI have wrote aboit the need for vocational educational as not everyone is cut out for university education and even if it severe as a stop gap for our teaming youth waiting for JAMB it was like what os he talking about but we have to continue for the love of our father landThank you and keep it comimgWakeel Abiodun BombataConcerned Nigerian

I cant agree more with you. However my visut for data capture in NIMC on 30th Sept gave me cause to hope. For once in a long time i got into a Govt establishment that work progressed smoothly fton one stafe to the other with courtesy by the staff. it was ordely movement from the height measurement to filling out the forms, data capture et al. A far cry from the confusion witb Drivers' licence regime in FRSC/VIO.Wishing NIMC the best as they fly tbe nigerian flag. I was happy for the experience.